The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere

The bridge to nowhere received a lot of media cover (not much coverage though), so let's discuss the bridge to everywhere, which is on the highway that toxins of power use to get anywhere and everywhere a seat of power exists.

Regular readers know that Toxins of Power Blog has previously considered the territory that the toxin of power increasingly inhabits, in the sense of idea propagation, or meme propagation, via various group dynamics.

Likewise this blog had a series which discussed how toxins of power can cause ideological change or "memetic morph," once ideas or memes are in memory.

The amygdala nodes are midbrain between the ears

Now, in this post Toxins of Power Blog will try to get to the nitty gritty, try to get to the main entry point where the toxins of power produce the initial trigger which intoxicates / morphs ideas or memes within the memory of the brain.

That place where the toxins of power begin their mysterious work is called the Amygdala (see also "the lizard brain", a.k.a. "the reptilian brain", not the same, but also strange).

This is a vast subject, however, if we stick to the fundamentals initially, there are elements that can be quickly and easily grasped:

The amygdala's response and regulation are thought to be critical to people's social behavior through the monitoring of daily life events such as danger signals.

(Science Daily, "New Clues"). Social behavior is a result, in some degree, of the dynamics of our amygdala:

During studies of the almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala – a region associated with processing emotions ... scientists have uncovered a cellular mechanism underlying the formation of emotional memories, which occurs in the presence of a well known stress hormone ... noradrenaline ... by controlling chemical and electrical pathways in the brain responsible for memory formation.

"This is a new way of understanding how neurons form long term memories in the amygdala," Dr Faber said.

"Our strongest and most vivid human memories are usually associated with strong emotional events such as those associated with extreme fear, love and rage."

"For many of us, our deepest memories are mental snapshots taken during times of high emotional impact or involvement," she said.

(Science Daily, Traumatic Memory, see also Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala). What this means is that ideas or memes that are already in memory, already part of a circuit, can be overridden in whole or in part by subsequent events, using either a technique or a phenomenon called fear conditioning, working on specific circuits:

There is a large amount of data indicating that the amygdala, a particular structure in the brain, is strongly involved during the learning of "conditioned" fear. However, until now, the underlying neuronal circuits have remained largely unknown.

Now, research ... has been able to identify, for the first time, distinct neuronal circuits within the central nucleus of the amygdala which are specifically involved in acquisition and control of behavioural fear responses.

(Scientific Daily, "New Circuits"). Long term use of such techniques or phenomenon can cause damage to the amygdala:

... a primitive region of the brain responsible for sensorimotor control also has an important role in regulating emotional responses to threatening situations. This region appears to work in concert with another structure called the amygdala to regulate social and emotional behavior ... researchers have recently discovered that activation of ... the deep layers of superior colliculus (DLSC), elicits defensive behaviors such as an exaggerated startle, hypervigilance, cowering, and escape. Researchers say it is possible that a prolonged activation of this defense system may lead to emotional disorders.

(Science Daily, "Emotional Balance"). These papers work hand in glove with previous posts on Toxins of Power blog.

For instance, in a series beginning with "A Structure RE: Corruption of Memes" we looked at how modification of ideas or memes can occur when circuits of memory are disrupted in individuals.

Then, in the post "The Territorial Realm of Toxins of Power" we attempted to graphically show how these mechanisms work on ideas or memes in the social group context we call meme complexes (see also "ruling group mind" below).

In conclusion, the toxins of power use circuits on the bridge of the amygdala to get to existing ideas or memes, cause a morph, then those morphed ideas or memes propagate within a meme complex (social group), and then ultimately they get to areas outside that meme complex.

The article "What Orwell Didn't Know" by Professor George Lakoff is in accord with this post:

Probably 98 percent of your reasoning is unconscious - what your brain is doing behind the scenes. Reason is inherently emotional. You can't even choose a goal, much less form a plan and carry it out, without a sense that it will satisfy you, not dis­gust you. Fear and anxiety will affect your plans and your ac­tions. You act differently, and plan differently, out of hope and joy than out of fear and anxiety.

Thought is physical. Learning requires a physical brain change: Receptors for neurotransmitters change at the synapses, which changes neural circuitry. Since thinking is the activation of such circuitry, somewhat different thinking re­quires a somewhat different brain. Brains change as you use them-even unconsciously. It's as if your car changed as you drove it, say from a stick shift gradually to an automatic.

(What Orwell Didn't Know, pp. 68-9; cf this). The amygdala can become "propaganda central" since it gets a first look at all incoming sensory perception, that is, before the "conscious brain" gets a look at it:

So some of the key interconnections of the amygdala — and these connections actually define what it does in a sense, at least with respect to fear — the amygdala gets sensory information directly from the various sensory systems that process the external world. So the visual system, the auditory system, olfactory, touch, pain, and so forth. All of these kind of come together, or converge, in the amygdala.

(see video below). Regular readers know that this blog hypothesizes that the toxins of power hijack the process of normal pattern formation in the brain circuitry, so as to convert that pattern into a corrupt pattern.

Thereafter, the meme complex (social group) helps propagate the corrupted idea or meme.

A classic example is detailed in a Dredd Blog post, where an individual knew that a memetic or ideological morph was taking place within his brain, but he was unable to get help or otherwise do anything about it.

Moving on to the civilization level, the issue of mass murder in the form of Ecocide engenders a discussion that focuses on subjects such as the meme complex, vaccime, and other group thinking, such as ruling group mind.

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Professor LeDoux on the amygdala ...

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Toxic Germ > Toxic Seed > Toxic Monster

Dredd Blog has a series entitled "Corp Germ > Corp seed > Corp Monster" which shows an evolution of corporations from a germ > to seed > to monster.

Since this blog focuses on underlying toxins of power to explain those types of corrupting events, this post will argue that the toxins of power can be traced or identified by watching that type of development within corporations.

The basic argument is that since corporations are a location for a centralization of power, if toxins of power exist, then they should be able to be found in various corporate footprints, corporate records.

Noam Chomsky recently commented on corporate leaders who are caught up in a meme complex infected to the hilt with the toxins of power:

“There is growing recognition that our financial system is running a doomsday cycle,” economists Peter Boone and Simon Johnson wrote in the Financial Times in January. “Whenever it fails, we rely on lax money and fiscal policies to bail it out. This response teaches the financial sector: Take large gambles to get paid handsomely, and don’t worry about the costs—they will be paid by taxpayers” through bailouts and other devices, and the financial system “is thus resurrected to gamble again—and to fail again.”

The doomsday metaphor also applies outside the financial world. The American Petroleum Institute, backed by the Chamber of Commerce and the other business lobbies, has intensified its efforts to persuade the public to dismiss concerns about anthropogenic global warming—with considerable success, as polls indicate. Among Republican congressional candidates in the 2010 election, virtually all reject global warming.

The executives behind the propaganda know that global warming is real, and our prospects grim. But the fate of the species is an externality that the executives must ignore, to the extent that market systems prevail. And the public won’t be able to ride to the rescue when the worst-case scenario unfolds.

(In These Times). What Noam is saying is that social policy and law compel corporate controllers to follow a path which, in the long term, is economically suicidal as well as being environmentally suicidal.

The central dynamic is a cycle of addiction which is criminally insane, because it will obviously lead to the doom of the system it is infecting, and most important for making it criminal, they know it.

This is the essence of toxins of power theory, that the toxins of power are an unseen, under the covers, and invisible government influence operating without any need for any conspiracy (cf. Epigovernment: The New Model - 7).

What Chomsky, Dredd Blog, Ecocosmology Blog, and a host of others are fingering is the mental, emotional, and spiritual state of denial.

That state of denial is essential for the seed, which came from the germ, to evolve into the monster, then do the damage.

A Structure RE: Corruption of Memes - 2

In the first post of this series we talked about memetic morph whereby a meme changes through some corruption of memory.

Some of the morph that takes place in such a case has been described in our series as a partial corruption of the strands of memes within an individual's memory.

One allegorical or symbolic example can be demonstrated by comparing what happens when there is a phenomenon that appears as an "innocent corruption of memory" described by Dr. Roger A. Pielke Sr. engendered by the inaccurate reading of text.

Even this can lead to memetic morphs that generate corrupt memes then their propagation throughout a meme complex, and even beyond that.

A paper released recently, which we will shortly get to, informs us of a scenario where corruption can take place in a structural manner which could lead to promulgation of corrupted memes, even though the subject matter is scientific data that is not itself corrupt.

First however, lets consider the case of the memes of climate change skeptics & global warming deniers within the meme complex harboring the notion that global climate change & global warming are the greatest hoax ever fostered on humanity.

Some of their ilk hacked into servers (central computers) of climate scientists to steal database data, email records, and documents of other types.

Upon analysis of that stolen information they formulated the meme that scientists were fabricating data to the degree that reports constructed from the data was biased to the point of being fraudulent.

That meme spread far and wide and is still strong within the denier meme complex.

Clearly toxins of power were at work when theft was chosen as the method of discovery in place of logic, argument, and scientific debate.

But there are other ways memes can become corrupt in an innocent manner, well short of theft.

Take the case revealed by a recent paper mentioned above, pointing out what is called citation mutation (a form of morph):

Few scientific studies have attracted as much attention as the "Cleavage of structural proteins during the assembly of the head of bacteriophage T4", published 40 years ago by Uli Laemmli. Referenced an estimated 2 x 10⁵ times (about 15 daily citations), it is unavoidable that the article is often cited incorrectly. Indeed, database searches reveal more than 600 variations of the correct reference ...

The omission, addition or replacement of one character on the keyboard by another lead to variations that can be described in genetic terms and classified as deletions, insertions, point mutations and inversions of characters, or as complete nonsense mutations.

(Mutations of Citations, The Scientist). The mutation of citations can lead to memetic morph when the wrong citation leads to an unintended paper that has similar sounding text, but in actuality is different.

Governments do deliberate memetic morph activities during propaganda wars where HTML links are studied, then sometimes changed, when the government wants to continue to cover up activity it considers harmful to the image it wants to project to the public.

In the case of deliberate corruption we can see the work of toxins of power, but in the case of negligent or mistaken corruptions, the toxins of power move in later in the process, so that, they are not always the primary cause of memetic mutations or morphs.

The next post in this series is here.

The Toxins Corrupt Frames of Mind

In a series of posts beginning here, we graphically depicted, in simple constructs, how a meme is stored in the "mind" and is transported via language into another mind.

This post is intended to expand upon that construct.

We will be focusing on the strands in the web that theoretically compose a meme, depicted by the globe of strands in the graphic above, to show that the extent of the meme reaches to more of an area than we traditionally conceive of as "memory".

In the original post we quoted Noam Chomsky, so in this post we will quote from George Lakoff, who was a student of Chomsky, and who is now sometimes said to be a proponent of some theories contrary to Chomsky.

Be that as it may, here we only want to learn from both of them as well as from other scientists, not to join one "side" or the other.

What Lakoff can add to our construct is that the composition of the strands of the web of a meme theoretically extend out to our bodies and to our emotions.

Using that extension we can see that the toxins of power work on an expansive field within those exposed to power, not just on the area covered by conventional notions of memory, but on reasoning, logic, and emotion as well.

But more than that, the toxins work on areas where cognitive frames of mind are interwoven together, that is, at the junctions such as morphemes, lexemes, and of course words.

There is an entire area of study dealing with the effects and purposes of "benign" propaganda or deceit, for example, showing that it is a massive endeavour.

One of the tactics utilized in that questionable endeavor is to change the meanings of words, for example, which would in turn change the structure of a meme and in some circumstances corrupt it.

As a recent example, recall the efforts to change the meme described by the word "torture" into the meme of "enhanced interrogation".

When any one of the components of a meme becomes corrupt, it can change the structure of that meme into a corrupt form, and thereby lead to propagation of that corruption.

Ecocide: Evidence Of Toxins of Power

People have a love affair with their new cars it has been said.

Some are so intimate with their vehicle that they use them as a weapon when they commit suicide.

For whatever reason some people park the car, put a hose from the exhaust through the window to the inside, then get back inside and wait for oblivion.

Suicide.

That perverse "vehicular intimacy" seems to be a relationship we are having with the Earth.

About ten years ago the main stream media began to report about a garbage gyre in the pacific ocean, which was about twice the size of Texas.

Now, more is known about gyres, and we now find that there are Five Continents of Garbage floating in the various oceans:

Thus far, we've found plastic milk crates, lighters, toothbrushes, bottle caps, shotgun shells, dental floss holders, buckets and bucket lids, bleach bottles, antifreeze bottles, plastic bags, plastic tubs, nail polish remover bottles, and every manner of plastic goods one would find in any grocery store across the world. As a crew, we collect this debris from the deck of the Sea Dragon with large fish nets and examine the contents. The results have been staggering. Ultimately, it's difficult to imagine the size of the problem that is now affecting the Atlantic too because our vantage is that of a needle in a haystack -- a 72 foot research sailboat amidst the vast wilderness of an enormous ocean. But what's certain, given the data and debris collected already along a transect, is that the problem of plastic in oceanic gyres worldwide is at least twice as bad as researchers knew before and is ubiquitous in the Atlantic as well.

(Five Gyre Org). In a post on this blog we have set forth the hypothesis that the toxins of power, anciently conceived of as a personal problem of an individual, are actually a greater danger than that.

We hypothesize that the toxins of power are a danger to entire groups, which may include entire nations.

This blog has even wondered if it the toxins of power is a cosmic phenomenon.

Now, with the recent discoveries of the garbage gyres, and other planet wide dangers, this blog now asserts that the toxins of power are a threat to our entire species in the sense that the toxins of power are a threat to our ecosystem.

It is as if the planet is saying: "Whatever you permit the toxins of power to influence you to do to the ecosystem, is exactly what you are allowing to be done to yourselves, up to and including the murder of the entire human species."

The murder of the planet, including humanity, is the definition of ecocide.

Thus, the toxins of power can kill, maim, and utterly destroy if not countered with antitoxins.

A Religious Doctrine For Toxins of Power

"The devil made me do it"

We have talked about the ultimate source of the toxins of power.

We have pondered Roger Penrose's theory that consciousness is a phenomenon describable, at its very lowest level, by quantum physics.

He notes, however, that the science of physics is unable to detect the foundation of consciousness at that level at this time.

We have asked if the toxins of power concern a cosmic phenomenon or whether the phenomenon is, instead, limited to the earth, or perhaps limited to only a few planets.

We have surmised that it is most likely a mystical notion anyway, no matter how we look at it, so now we take a look at some ancient concepts for the source of the toxins of power.

According to one online encyclopedia:

The Devil is believed in certain religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The Devil is commonly associated with heretics, infidels, and other unbelievers. The Abrahamic religions have variously regarded the Devil as a rebellious fallen angel or demon that tempts humans to sin or commit evil deeds. Others regard the Devil as an allegory that represents a crisis of faith, individualism, free will, wisdom and enlightenment.

(Wikipedia, Devil). Some of the more radical verses of the New Testament in Christian Theology say that this Devil being hides, but is the controlling power of the nations of this planet:

In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them ... lest the light ... should shine unto them.
...
And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness ...

(2 Cor 4:4, 2 Cor 11:14-15, KJV). This Devil creature has people "ministering" for him these passages declare.

There is even a Bible passage where Jesus was tempted by this creature who was claiming to control the kingdoms of the world:

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

(Matthew 4:8-9, KJV). According to these writings Jesus even indicated that some of the religious leaders of his day, who were trying to kill him, were controlled by the Devil creature:

Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

(John 8:44, KJV). This concept does identify a source for toxins ("the father of it") we call falsehoods or deceptive thinking.

Whew! All this is heady stuff.

Clearly there was recognition in ancient times that something unseen and toxic or bad caused human beings to behave in a bad or toxic manner.

Behavioral scientists today have several theories which are evolution based, not religion based, but still there is no definitive authority for a completely prevailing theory.

That is not a show stopper, because we have the same problem with gravity and time.

We can't completely get to the bottom of it, we can't yet fully isolate gravity to a "graviton", the smallest theoretical component of gravity, so we still struggle with what it is.

Nevertheless, we have formulas to work with gravity, and we have formulas to work with the toxins of power.

Microbiologists may have established a link to microbes as a source for toxins of power as shown in Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power.

Is Toxic Power A Cosmic Phenomenon?

Not all nations of the earth subscribe to the notion that power corrupts those who inhabit seats of power.

In large measure the notion is limited to English speaking nations, but many people from non-English speaking nations study the theories of government and political science we subscribe to.

If our cosmology and solar science is correct, the solar systems are terrifying places in the long run, requiring migration from habitable planet to habitable planet.

If the toxins of power are inhibiting our ability to comply with the tenets of ecocosmology, then it might be a good idea to find a way to detect the toxins on a planet before we choose it as a place to make a new home world.

Our science does not yet understand, at the quantum mechanics level, how our mind works.

In fact, Roger Penrose, a famous physicist, even says lots of fantasy is contained within our physics.

Thus, since we really can't detect the furthest reaches of our minds, we are not really able to detect the toxins at the quantum level either.

The only thing to do seems to be to keep working at it.

Modification Of The Formula

The original formula was:

C = (O * Y) ((T¹ .. Tº) - (A¹ .. Aº))

(see Tables For Toxins). It is being modified to:

C = (O * Y) ((T¹ .. Tº) - (A¹ .. Aº) + 1)

This modification adds a "+1" to the toxin - antitoxin arithmetic. This is done to add more focus or emphasis upon the "O * Y" factor.

The "O * Y" portion of the formula relates to the time in office, which could be too easily neutralized under the earlier formula.

That is because the (T¹ .. Tº) - (A¹ .. Aº) could have become zero which would neutralize the time in office arithmetic.

We also add a rule that "T - A" can not be a negative number but can be only as low as zero.